Office automation and users need' for support

Abstract

We investigated a recently introduced office automation system at Swedish Telecom. In a first study, where 275 users answered an inventory, the users indicated that they found the system useful, but that they would like better user support. Paper and on-line support were most often used at the syntax level, but were not regarded to be very satisfactory. Human advisors were found to be consulted most often, as well as being reported the most satisfactory means of support at the task and conceptual levels. In an interview study concerning the electronic mail system, the results from 35 users showed that the users were satisfied with the system, but that they knew fairly little about it, particularly at the semantic level. A third study showed that the system support personnel knew their users rather well. When asked to describe the system, system support personnel mainly described the system in computer terms, whereas many other users described it non-informatively. It is concluded that knowledgeable human advisors are needed to support the efficient use of a system by illuminating task and semantic aspects. At the same time, easy-to-use manuals are needed to support the reminding about syntactic and interaction details.